By most people the Dog is valued only during his life; his skin is not particularly valuable, and his flesh is little esteemed. This is by no means, however, the case everywhere. It is well known that the Chinese use the Dog as a regular article of food. Many of the North American tribes look upon an _entrée_ of Dog as the greatest possible _bonne bouche_ they can set before a stranger. Sir Leopold McClintock relates that, in the Sandwich Islands, he had most profuse apologies offered to him because there was no puppy to be had for a feast to which he was invited. The Eskimo, too, look upon a dish of young Dog as a great treat; and it is related that a Danish captain provided his friends with a feast of this kind, and when they _praised his mutton_, sent for the skin of the beast, and exhibited it to them! The Greeks and Romans also used the Dog as an article of diet, and many ancient writers, such as Galen and Hippocrates, represent Dog-meat as a highly desirable dish. [Illustration: SKULL OF DOMESTIC DOG.] It is a remarkable circumstance, when we come to consider the probable origin of the Dog, that there is evidence of his domestication at such early periods, and by so many savage tribes in different parts of the world. As we have already seen, tame Dogs were possessed by savages in the neolithic, or newer stone period, by the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and the ancient inhabitants of North and South America, to say nothing of the numerous savage tribes at the present day, such as the Australians and the inhabitants of Guiana. Now the important question arises, had all these Dogs a common origin? Did the great neolithic Dog, the Sheep-dog of Job’s time, the Greyhounds, Turnspits, and Hounds of the Assyrians and Greeks, the divinely-honoured animals of Peru, and the supposed ancestors of the Eskimo and the Chippeways, spring from a single pair? or have various wild species of _Canidæ_ been tamed and converted into true domestic Dogs, by different people in different parts of the world, these various species having since been crossed and re-crossed with one another and with their parent forms, until a species has been produced as complex in its origin as the English nation, which has flowing in its veins the blood of ancient Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, Norman, and Fleming?